The present invention relates to software systems for financial management of businesses. More specifically, the present invention relates to a uniform financial reporting system interface that utilizes staging tables having a standardized structure, which is not tied to a data schema or business rules of any particular general ledger system.
A general ledger is a storehouse for financial activity and history (accounting information) of a company. Currently, a number of different general ledger software systems are available for storing accounting information. Thus, each general ledger system, being utilized for storing accounting information, may be from a different vendor or on a different platform (Oracle, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.).
Financial reporting tools, which access and report information form general ledger databases, are widely known in the art and are widely available in the consumer market. Some prior art financial reporting tools include program code in their software to directly access a particular general ledger database (i.e., the program code (such as SQL statements) in the software of such reporting tools is tied to a structure or business rules of the particular general ledger database). One problem with such an approach is that, when a new interface to a new general ledger has to be added, the program code of the reporting tool needs to be modified to provide access to the new general ledger. Such modifications in the program code of the reporting tool could damage the access to the other general ledger database. Further, from a programming or coding standpoint, such an approach is very complex.
To overcome the above problem, one financial reporting system separates the general ledger database access code from the financial reporting tool software. Specifically, this system utilizes a uniform interface, which includes general ledger database access methods, that can receive a generalized request from a financial reporting tool and translate the generalized request into a specific query which, upon execution, retrieves data from a particular general ledger database. The uniform interface returns the retrieved data to the reporting tool. This technique simplifies the financial reporting system by allowing for separate development, testing, implementation and modification of the reporting tool for each specific general ledger system.
Although the above method helps overcome coding complexity problems arising from supporting multiple general ledger systems, there is a need to improve financial report execution performance when large general ledger databases are accessed.